Taiwan Denies Plutonium Testing

Oct. 15, 2004
Strait Times

TAIPEI - Taiwan denied that the island's nuclear weapons programme - abandoned in the 1980s - involved experimenting with separating plutonium.

Diplomats in Vienna said that inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have found samples indicating that plutonium experiments were done about 20 years ago in Taiwan.

But Mr Yang Chao-yie, deputy chairman of the Taiwanese Cabinet's Atomic Energy Council, said that the experiments did not happen and that scientists only researched the possibility of making nuclear arms.

'We never made any plutonium separation experiments, not in the 1980s, and not earlier,' Mr Yang said.

'The programme was just research,' he said, without elaborating.

The plutonium produced inside a nuclear reactor needs to be separated and purified before it can be used in a nuclear weapon.

Officials at the Vienna-based IAEA said they would not comment on the remarks by the diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

In Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhang Qiyue said China is investigating the reports, but cannot comment until more is known.

The nuclear project - which started in the 1960s, stopped in the 1970s and was briefly revived in the 1980s - has long been common knowledge on the island.

Mr Andrew Yang, a defence analyst at the Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies, a Taipei think tank, said the Taiwanese scientists were trying to process plutonium before the project was shut down under US pressure.

It was closed shortly after a Taiwanese military officer, Mr Chang Hsien-yi, defected to America in 1988 with information about the programme, the analyst said.

The agency's inspections and testing were being conducted as part of voluntary extra controls on Taiwan's peaceful nuclear programme agreed to by the government. -- AP

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